21st Century Scholar

by Bill Tierney I came back from ASHE in Vancouver a week ago and finally have caught my breath.  In the meantime, I am heading to a conference in San Francisco, and I spoke at a one day event held in Las Vegas last Thursday.  The first ASHE conference I went to must have been [...]

The purpose(s) of compulsory education in modern America have not been clear. Today, during President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s announcement of the criteria for the “Race to the Top” Fund, they will become a little clearer. In The Washington Post, both the President and Secretary of Education discussed the new plan. Duncan outlined four reforms: “To reverse [...]

Tapped, a blog by the folks at The American Prospect, recently commented on some comments made by Arne Duncan. In particular, the Secretary of Education said great teachers perform “miracles every single day” and effective teachers “walk on water.” The blogger, Dana Goldstein, describes the ideology of Arne Duncan: Teachers can and do educate disadvantaged students, but [...]

The vast majority of undocumented students did not come to the United States of their own free will.  Their parents brought them here as infants or small children.  Most of these students are hard-working and well-intentioned.  What should happen to them when they graduate from high school?  Like all students they can go to college [...]

“Publish or perish,” the adage we all hear bandied about research communities. Perhaps it is a tad outdated. A more accurate, contemporary saying may read “Find funding, show results, and publish or perish.” A little of the alliterative panache of the former, however, is lost in the later. So, despite its misleading simplicity, I will [...]

Laurent Cantet’s The Class, Entre les Murs in French, accentuates experiences typically ignored in most classroom-based films and elicits new feelings from the audience. Based on François Bégaudeau’s semi-autobiographical book about the life of a teacher in an inner-city school in Paris, we follow the evolution (or de-evolution) of Monsieur Marin, played by Bégaudeau, and [...]

A contrary argument to Goldin and Katz is made by Andrew Hacker in The New York Review of Books. Hacker questions if we actually need a more educated workforce. He has roamed through the predictions of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and suggests that we don’t need all those engineers that are currently being trained. Instead, [...]